He is reminded that he has described himself recently as 'sexually normal.' Is Rabbit Angstrom 'sexually normal'? This is all very interesting about Dreiser. 'He was an instinctive truthteller in a society that erected quite a few defenses against truth of this sort.' Updike squeals a little with the fun of this, glancing over for encouragement. This was very galling to the guardians of society's morals because innocent girls could read this and think - Hey! This is the way to go!' He would show women who had fallen, or slept out of marriage, or were mistresses, and who didn't suffer enough for it. 'Yeah, he had a constant battle all of his life with his sexual frankness. Updike sits in a near crouch, back hunched, knees forward, hands together. And his letters and his life show what we would now think would be a healthy interest in sex' - Updike can't quite suppress a little grunt of lascivious pleasure at the very idea - 'but it was thought to be unhealthily much in his day.' 'He was criticized for it, as a matter of fact, for being sex-obsessed.

'It was for Dreiser,' Updike says, skittering away from the question. Here his face lights up, a little bulb of tickled self-consciousness: 'My world view!' So I don't think we're so different in the end,' he and Dreiser. We want sex, mostly, but then we seem to want good clothes so we can get the sex, and we want money so we can get the clothes to get the sex. Although really what does his analysis amount to? It's just saying that people want things.' Wunt, Updike says, with yearning. 'I've not tried to analyze my society the way that Dreiser to some extent did. Dreiser's novels, he says, 'show the big cogwheels of society turning beneath the little cogs of individual lives.' Dreiser's approach to fiction, Updike says, is 'more diagrammatic' than his own.Ī gentle distinction from a gentle spirit. Sex, it seems, shares a twin bill with God as a central preoccupation of modern man, and certainly of the man to whose life story Updike has now returned four times, the dreamer and screw-up Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom.įeathery-haired and forever nursing a grin, Updike gets around to sex and much else by way of the book on the coffee table in his hotel suite - a new biography of Theodore Dreiser, the great-but-forgotten American writer of the early century, which Updike is reviewing. NEW YORK - It doesn't take John Updike long to get around to sex.

Rabbit angstrom